It is the love of God that reveals Him as the promise-making, promise-keeping God.
Jeremiah 33:14-16 reiterates an earlier divine promise — a promise offered by God on several occasions to abate human impatience and doubt. “The days are coming,” says the Lord, and indeed they are coming because God is as His word and His word is motivated by love. When this promise is fulfilled, then His love will be manifest for all to see, engendering faith and increasing love. This makes Jeremiah’s prophesy a fitting first fact of Advent: God acts for us out of love.
What we have in these verses from Jeremiah is a prophesy: A word of knowledge about the future that only God can tell and only LORD Himself knows. Fortune-tellers cannot prognosticate this way. Horoscopes offer no such insights. Farmers Almanac, palm-readers, crystal balls — none of these superstitious scams can tell the future, let alone make promises about it, much less actually fulfill promises made about the future. Jeremiah conveyed a gospel-promise from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To be specific, it’s not actually Jeremiah’s prophetic word at all. He’s merely the messenger. The prophetic word originates from Israel’s God. And God makes this promise from a disposition of divine love, for God is love. It is the love of God that reveals Him as the promise-making, promise-keeping God.
It is the love of God that reveals Him as the promise-making, promise-keeping God
The prophetic promise finds introduction with these words: “‘The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (33:14). Now before we get to the actual content of the promise, it should jolt us that the promise goes to the “house of Israel” at all, and that’s because Jeremiah heralds this prophesy sometime after the year 628 BC — a hundred years after the “house of Israel” was carried off into exile by Assyrians in 722 BC. Astonishingly, Jeremiah says that the LORD, who scattered the northern kingdom of Israel (consisting of ten of the twelve tribes) throughout the Gentile world, will fulfill a promise to those absorbed by the Gentiles, along with the remaining two tribes of identifiable Jews within the “house of Judah.” In other words, since “Israel” ceased to exist (having been absorbed into and rendered indistinguishable from the Gentiles), the promise being made here is for both Jew and Gentile. The upshot is that “Israel” will be reconstituted by Jews and Gentiles, and that this would be the LORD’s doing as a result of a loving promise. An astonishing prophecy.
To be sure, Jeremiah’s auditors could see no way in which it was possible for God to do anything for the “house of Israel.” They were gone; absorbed among the Gentiles, lost forever. Unless, of course, the LORD would fulfill a promise to His people as Gentiles. But that couldn’t be the case because, his auditors would have reasoned, God hates the uncircumcised Gentiles, right? Wrong. Think again, says Jeremiah. He doesn’t hate them. He actually loves them. And what’s more amazing still is that verse 24 calls these two groups “families,” indicating that they, too, should love one another because they are purposed to be family by God’s design. There’s one race: the human race, and both Jew and Gentile were created by and rightly belong to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In a reconstituted “Israel” Jew and Gentile would be one people, one family.
In a reconstituted “Israel” Jew and Gentile would be one people, one family
But it gets even more difficult for Jeremiah’s auditors to believe that God would make, let alone fulfill, any such promise. Not only was there baked-in antipathy to the Gentiles, but there was a malediction against the royal blood line of David that ran through Solomon! David’s prodigy was cursed on account of both the wickedness of the kings and people, such that culminated in the godless rule of King Jehoiachin in the early 500s BC. Speaking the word of the LORD, Jeremiah imprecates his descendants saying that no descendant of Jehoiachin would ever reign on the throne of Israel: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Write this man down as childless, A man who shall not prosper in his days; For none of his descendants shall prosper, sitting on the throne of David, And ruling anymore in Judah’” (Jeremiah 22:30). With Israel lost to the sands of time, Judah too was a dead end.
This curse is considered by some Jewish commentators as the reason that Zerubbabel, the hereditary Solomonic king during the time of Nehemiah, was not given a kingship under the Persian Empire. The facts regarding his life are not only recorded in Scripture, but Iraqi excavations have produced records that have direct bearing on his life, namely the famous “Jehoiachin’s Ration Tablets”[1]. These tablets, discovered at the turn of the twentieth-century, were excavated near the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, and have been dated to c. 592 BC. Archeological evidence shows that the word of the LORD through Jeremiah was fulfilled when Jehoiachin was captured, Judah and Jerusalem were destroyed along with the temple, leaving no royal heir to the throne of David. God’s word proved unassailable, accomplishing precisely what He said.
So the “branch” was cut off after Jehoiachin, the last of the Davidic kings. Neither Zerubbabel nor anyone else from David’s house would reign over Judah, much less a restored Israel. Or so it would seem until God, ever jeopardizing His credibility, promised the impossible. The impossible promise comes in the image of a new shoot, sprouting from the stump of an old tree:
Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David, and He shall execute justice and righteousness. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem shall dwell securely. And this is the name by which the City of God shall be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”
This stunning promise precisely fits the situation of the truncated Davidic dynasty. David’s lineage had been decimated since the days of his egomaniac grandson, Reheboam. It was under Reheboam’s ill-fated reign that the northern ten tribes of Israel went rogue and were obliterated. In the southern kingdom of Judah, things likewise disintegrated. In succeeding generations, David’s heirs to the throne were enmeshed in scandals and geopolitical blunders. Wars ensued, and they, too, eventually and even permanently forfeited hereditary claimants to David’s throne. The royal tree of David was reduced to Jesse’s stump. Along with the loss of kings and kingdom came the dissipation of blessings associated with David’s rule. Jerusalem herself would become a byword, emblematic of divine forsakenness. Zion wouldn’t be “Jerusalem the golden,” but “Jerusalem the cursed.” Yes, it’s this impossible situation that God confronts with a word of availing hope to evidence that the fulfillment of this promise under these circumstances could only be accomplished by the LORD.
But how? What would signal the advent of Israel’s reconstitution? Nearly two centuries after Jeremiah’s incredible prophecy, Malachi augments the Weeping Prophet’s words with this addendum from the LORD: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes” (4:5). With this specificity, Jews and wise Gentiles (Magi!) could better identify the coming “Son of David” who would be “the LORD our righteousness.”
And there is the key to the prophesy: It would be the LORD who would be Israel’s righteousness. Not the people, not their attempts at keeping the Law, not the land, not their pedigree, not a pedestrian descendant of David, not even the temple. Nothing but the LORD would or could be their righteousness because “None is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). God’s righteousness would need to be manifest before all, and need to be given to Jew and Gentile alike. Instead of doing the Law, Jews and Gentiles would trust in the LORD to be our righteousness and account us as righteous for His own sake.
And there is the key to the prophesy: It would be the LORD who would be Israel’s righteousness. Not the people, not their attempts at keeping the Law, not the land, not their pedigree, not a pedestrian descendant of David, not even the temple
With Jeremiah’s prophecy, the LORD throws the spotlight on the covenant made with Abram, while he was yet uncircumcised. Look to the unilateral covenant made with ‘Abram the Gentile’ for the fulfillment of the prophesy concerning Israel-absorbed-into-the-Gentiles. Look in faith to the Advent of “God with us” (Immanuel) to bring about the impossible, and to do so out of His great love for the world. Advent begins with the fact of God’s love for the world.
All of these tragedies — the cutting off of Davidic line, the leveling of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple — occur so that readers of Jeremiah and Malachi and all the Holy Scriptures would be trained to identify the work of the LORD for our redemption and trust in His righteousness, but never look to any of these institutions as ever being able to bring the reality that God promises. The land will be upended. The temple will be destroyed. Israel will be dissolved. Even the chain of David’s descendants would need to be broken. Trust, Jeremiah pleads, trust in the promise-making, promise-keeping God of Abraham, for He and He alone can and will be the righteousness we need but can never obtain. The LORD Himself will fulfill what He has promised, the LORD himself will perform His covenant, the Lord Himself will be the King, the LORD will reconstitute Israel, provide salvation, furnish a holy temple that we might worship in Spirit and in Truth. The unlikeliness of it all tells us that God does this out of great love because nothing other than that motivation — love — could move God to accomplish the impossible.
Trust, Jeremiah pleads, trust in the promise-making, promise-keeping God of Abraham, for He and He alone can and will be the righteousness we need but can never obtain
The “righteous shoot” is the Hebrew version of an ancient Near Eastern term meaning the “legitimate son.” The legitimate king is the LORD’s agent, an agent to establish justice and righteousness before the law of God. But that’s not all, through the promised righteous king, in v.16, the LORD receives the credit for the salvation of Judah and Jerusalem. The point is driven home through a new name given to the city: “the LORD [is] our righteousness.” This realization adds to Ezekiel’s prophecy that the city of God will have the name “the LORD is here” or, put into the prophetic words of Isaiah, confirmed in fulfillment by Saint Matthew upon the adventen name of Jesus: “Immanuel,” which means “God with us” (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23). Altogether, the prophecies and disclosures collapse the ideas of the “righteous shoot” and “the LORD our righteousness” into one and the same person — the Messiah. This is the onus of verse 17 — only the LORD as Messiah could fulfill the everlasting promise that follow verses 14-16: “For thus says the LORD: David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, and the Levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presences to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings, and to make sacrifices forever.” Again, all of these promises coalesce in Jesus the Son, who is the immortal King of kings (1 Timothy 6:15), the everlasting high priest greater than Melchizedek (Hebrews 6:20; 7), the one that stands before the Eternal Throne as the sacrificed Lamb of God (Revelation 5:6).
The fact of David’s historicity and the royal “house of David” is not only preserved in the historical accounts of the Bible, but also by the findings of the renown Jewish archeologist, Dr Gabriel Barkey. Barkey discovered two separate artifacts — a stone inscription, and an amulet — both of which mention the historical “house of David” and date to the 9th and 10th centuries BC. All four Gospels assert that Jesus was either the “son of David” or a descendent of the “house of David” or both. All four Gospels are at pains to substantiate that Jesus is the Messiah, the rightful heir to the throne of David. All four Gospels and the New Testament as a whole promulgate, in their own way, the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophesy memorably encapsulated in St. John’s words, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (3:16). John the Baptist, the Elijah which was to come, he likewise identifies Jesus as the One, the Son of David, God’s Messiah, sent out of God’s great love for the Israel whom He reconstitutes in Himself.
The salvation announcements in Jeremiah 33 answer at least two questions left from the preceding narrative: First, how can people who persistently rebelled and even offered their children to Molech, become covenant partners with God? The answer: The LORD will heal, cleanse, forgive (vv 6–8) and have mercy (v 26) for no other reason than the fact that He loves us and will Himself make atonement and fulfill all righteousness. Perfect justice. Perfect righteousness. This is a fact because God is in Himself perfect love. His love in Christ refashions a new humanity — one purchased by way of a redemption that required blood atonement, an expiation of sins, and the imputation of perfect righteousness from having fulfilled the lawn a representative fashion for us. A new humanity born of His Spirit, the Spirit of the Last Adam, for new obedience within His Jerusalem — the Holy Church. A people who were not a people, become Israel. Jerusalem is saved. Judah dwells securely.
The greatness of God’s love is manifest in and through a redemption that is all about forgiveness. Love is not about feelings; it’s really about forgiveness, and that can be found at the heart of Jeremiah’s astonishing adventen prophecy. Forgiveness flows from divine love.
[1] Under the direction of German archeologist, Robert Koldewey, the Babylon excavations from 19899 — 1917 recovered nearly 300 uniform texts pertaining to the disbursement of rations from the royal provisions.
